Most big city newspapers, especially the Sunday editions, are voluminous and bulky, being typically composed of a folded outer jacket and a side-by-side collection of other sections as well as numerous advertising and coupon inserts tucked within the outer jacket. With such size and makeup, they are floppy and hard to handle. However, timely delivery of large numbers of newspapers demands that automated equipment be utilized in assembling them.
To achieve the objective of timely delivery, the automated equipment commonly employs units, such as loaders, metering hoppers and conveyors, interfaced in an arrangement which allows automatic loading and collating of the parts of the newspapers in a rapid and systematic manner.
In one arrangement of automated equipment, multiple tandemly-arranged sets of loaders and metering hoppers feed different newspaper parts onto a common conveyor from which the different parts are collated into assembled newspapers. Each loader feeds newspaper parts one after another into its associated hopper wherein they form a stack and from which they are bottom fed seriatim onto the common conveyor. Typically, each loader has a bulk loading conveyor which pemits newspaper parts to be loaded thereon in large stacks and then fanned back into a stream on the loading conveyor in which the trailing portion of each newspaper part is overlapped by the leading portion of the next succeeding one. The newspaper parts in the stream thereof are moved to a discharge location above the associated hopper where they are dropped into the hopper so as to form the stack therein. Each hopper employs a reciprocating device, such as disclosed in the application and patent cross-referenced above, which is operative, while supporting the stack in the hopper, to lift the stack slightly, form ridges in the lowermost newspaper part and concurrently feed it outwardly from under the stack.
As the number of inserts and thus the thicknesses and looseness of the newspaper parts continue to increase, the normal difficulties encountered in loading the parts into the hopper and feeding them from the hopper tend to increase, and, if not reduced, will result in more frequent misfeeding of parts which leads to jamming of the equipment and costly downtime. For example, when a stack of newspaper parts is placed on the bulk loading conveyor of the loader and fanned back by hand in preparation for feeding them in a stream to an associated hopper, sometimes the bottom side of the outer jacket fails to slide back with the rest of the jacket and instead "boils up" and rolls forward, allowing the sections and inserts of the newspaper part to spread out from one another and the outer newspaper jacket and causing a loose, enlarged loop at the fold line. Such loop then tends to be gripper by feeding mechanism downstream, instead of the insert-filled portion of the paper, pulling the jacket free from the inserts and causing jam-ups and misfeeds. Also, when the newspaper parts are fed from each loader to its associated hopper, they must be ejected outwardly from its discharge end a sufficient distance to clear it so that they can then properly drop downwardly on top of one another to form a neat stack within the hopper. As the thickness and looseness of the newspaper part increases, so does the tendency of its leading portion to droop and the part to thereby not eject from the loader at a proper attitude to ensure that it will remain intact on the stack. Further, in bottom feeding the lowermost newspaper part from the stack thereof in the hopper, sometimes just the outer jacket of the lowermost part is gripped by the clamping nip rollers and fed from the stack without the remainder of the newspaper part.